Sunday, 14 January 2018

THE LEIGH SPENCE MOMENT: THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER

57. “Belief in yourself is what you lack. Attack, attack,
and never look back.”

14/01/2018

Space at home is scarce, but if I am ever in the position to
have a coffee table, two of the three coffee table books I would have, if that
really is a genre, are the two song writing books by Stephen Sondheim, “Look, I
Made a Hat,” and “Finishing the Hat.” The third would be “The Animator’s
Survival Kit” by the Canadian-British animator Richard Williams, credited on
the book for directing the animation for “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” for which
he won a special Academy Award, something only given out three times since
1989.

Without Williams, the suspension of disbelief required for “Who
Framed Roger Rabbit” simply would not have worked. Production on the file was
moved from Los Angeles to London to accommodate Williams and his animators,
still drawing by hand, combining Disney, Warner Bros., MGM and other characters
in a way that seemed possible at that single moment, and would never work again
– that Williams pulled it off at all is a miracle.

However, Williams’s magnum opus as an animator was never
meant to have been a production made for someone else, or other productions
like “Ziggy’s Gift,” “Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure” or the
countless TV advertisements made by his company. Just like Orson Welles taking
acting and voiceover jobs to make his films, Williams was using his money to
produce a feature film of his own, inspired by the tales of Mullah Nasruddin.

“The Thief and the Cobbler,” variously titled “Nasrudin,” “Tin
Tack,” “The Majestic Fool” and “Once…” during its near thirty-year gestation
period, features, well, a thief, a cobbler (named “Tack”), a sultan, a
princess, and a villain voiced by Vincent Price, Zigzag the Grand Vizier. The
story is inconsequential, but one person wants to gain power, and the other person
wins because of their inherent goodness. Anthony Quayle, Donald Pleasence,
Kenneth Williams and Stanley Baxter also provided voices, but Tack and the
thief say nothing, their reactions driving the plot like they were Charlie Chaplin
and Jacques Tati. If anything, the characters and story exist to serve the gorgeous
animation, both intricate and two-dimensional, inspired by Persian miniature
paintings, while featuring hand-drawn geometric designs now routinely handed to
computer programs to complete.

Sadly, “The Thief and the Cobbler,” again like some Orson
Welles films, remains unfinished… well, it was finished, but not by Williams. The
leverage of producing “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” led to a deal with Warner Bros.
to complete the film, but what Williams had been producing at his own pace, rewriting
and redrawing scenes as he wanted, now had other people depending upon it, and
a deadline of 1991 to meet, leading to Williams being kicked off his pet
project. For someone who insisted on animating every frame of the finished film
– animation is usually produced “on twos” instead, to save time and money – the
result was unfortunately inevitable.

With a completion bond being signed by Warner Bros. to
ensure they had a finished film, and with the guarantors employing TV animation
producer Fred Calvert to supervise production, Warner Bros. ultimately abandoned
the film when they saw what was made, which was fifteen minutes short of a
completed film. The guarantors replaced Williams with Calvert, to complete the
film as quickly and cheaply as possible – the results were only released in
South Africa and Australia as “The Princess and the Cobbler,” but was recut and
released by Miramax – hmmm - as a “[Disney’s] Aladdin” rip-off titled “Arabian
Knight,” with the originally silent Tack and thief now voiced by wise-cracking
Matthew Broderick and Jonathan Winters. Remembering that this all began in
1964, “The Thief and the Cobbler” was finally seen in the UK, where it was
made, when a DVD was released in 2012.

This film has been endlessly discussed, and a bootleg of Williams’
workprint is as responsible for preserving the film’s reputation as much as
that of “Blade Runner,” although we will not see a director’s cut here – the workprint
is now held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and is
subtitled by Williams as “A Moment in Time.” While our view of film, for the
last fifty years, has been based on the guiding light of the “auteur,” it can
be argued that animation requires too many people for this to be viable, unless
you are on a very small scale, like Bill Plympton, or you afforded yourself an
extraordinary amount of time – it does not appear to be possible any other way.